1. Field
Embodiments of the present disclosure relate to a semiconductor device for performing power management and a method of operating the same, and more particularly, to a semiconductor device for performing power management based on one or more tokens and an operation method thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
During an operation of a semiconductor device, there may occur a period in which a peak instantaneous current flows in the semiconductor device, thereby consuming more power than the average power consumed by the semiconductor device.
A section corresponding to the period is called a peak zone (PKZ) and the operation including this section is called a peak zone operation.
When the semiconductor device includes a plurality of chips and the plurality of chips simultaneously perform respective peak zone operations, a failure may occur in the semiconductor device due to excessive current consumption.
In order to substantially prevent such a failure, a power management technique using a token has been used in a conventional semiconductor device. Specifically, such a conventional semiconductor device includes a plurality of chips having a unidirectional ring structure.
A chip in the conventional semiconductor device having the unidirectional ring structure waits until a sufficient amount of token is collected by the chip to perform a peak zone operation. As used in this disclosure, the term ‘token’ indicates authorization to perform a specific operation. For example, when a chip receives a token and an amount of the received token is equal to or greater than a threshold value, the chip can perform the specific operation. However, one of skilled in the art will understand that such references are merely for convenience of description and are not intended to limiting. Specifically, the term ‘an amount of token’ can be used interchangeably with another term ‘a number of tokens.’ For example, the amount of token equal to 70 can correspond to the number of tokens equal to 70.
Accordingly, when the conventional semiconductor device further includes a next chip operating subsequent to the chip, the next chip cannot perform a corresponding peak zone operation and is in a standby state, even if there is a sufficient amount of token to perform the corresponding peak zone operation in the next chip. As a result, the operation performance of the conventional semiconductor device is deteriorated.